


Love's Labor's Lost

by Shiggityshwa



Series: Watch the Birdie [12]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Character Death, Dark Alternate Universe, Episode: s10e13 The Road Not Taken, F/M, Ori, Pre-the road not taken, Pregnancy, dark au, orici, ver isca
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:08:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27165001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shiggityshwa/pseuds/Shiggityshwa
Summary: An imagined retelling of Season 9 and 10 in the 'Road Not Taken' universe. Twelfth in an ongoing series detailing what happened in the The Road Not Taken universe before Sam's arrival. Focuses Cameron's fall from grace and Vala's incarceration at Area 51. This story deals specifically with returning to the Milky Way galaxy.
Relationships: Vala Mal Doran/Cameron Mitchell
Series: Watch the Birdie [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1183454
Kudos: 2





	1. That Strain Again

He wakes up and immediately knows something isn’t right. The air is cooler and smells different than the dusty, sooty odor he’s gotten used to living in for the last seven months. The scent of sweat, and horse shit in the street, and people being burned alive.

The bed he’s in isn’t the one he’s gotten used to at their house—their small row house with the stairs that creak and the cushion on the landing—because they’re not as itchy. They’re softer, lighter, almost silky against his skin, and he realizes he’s not wearing a shirt.

Also, that he’s face down into some puffy pillows.

Attempts to do a push up, but his lower back seizes. He can feel the skin tear under the movement and his shaky arms collapse underneath him as he lets out a grunt, hot breath shooting out of his flaring nostrils and bouncing back right into his face.

Tries again, harder this time, using all the strength he has and grinding his teeth through the pain, the burning, ripping through his back.

When he collapses again, even more stressed, more pained, more out of breath, he tries to figure out where he is. Most of the furniture is a pale gray, the designs are too alien to be anything from the village.

The last thing he remembers is speaking with Jackson—he was in Sam’s body, sitting in front of some damn camcorder while he talked about what was going on with Ver Isca, about the legion of ships setting course for the Milky Way, about the Ori burning or chaining up anyone who didn’t follow the rules, about how Vala was pregnant and the Priors thought it was with someone called the Orici—

“Vala?” Calls reminiscent of stumbling through a forest drunk on the Supergate transference. The mud caking his face and boots, low hanging boughs scraping against his arms, her sleeping so peacefully on a stone slab. “Vala!”

They were with Seevis—the asshole convinced them that he could link to their galaxy if they had a way to end the Ori rule, if they could send ships to liberate the people and villages who lived within the dark ages.

Eventually they agreed, because dying for a chance to get out of this galaxy was worth it. Going back to Earth and watching their child toddle along on green grass within a fenced-in yard while he sipped lemonade and held her hand made it worth it.

She volunteered to use the device, but they didn’t know how it would affect the baby, now big enough to be it’s own consciousness—if they would share a body again, if it could hurt their kid, so he vetoed that idea and underwent the transfer himself, which wasn’t that bad, only Sam had one hell of a headache and needed a decent night’s sleep.

He hears the sound of something whooshing open behind him, and footsteps entering the room. They’re soft, but not so evenly paced, her left foot landing harder than her right because she carries more weight on that side.

“Vala?”

“Darling.” There the lick of cool fingers at the back of his neck, calming him back into laying down. When he struggles to turn his head, to get a look at her and see if she’s okay, she pets through his hair and softly coos, “just relax.”

“What—what happened? Did I—?” About to ask if he’s going for round three of needing to relearn how to walk again, but when he wiggles his piggies this time, they do the dance easily, allowing him to relax a little easier. “Is everything okay?—are you—?”

She helps him turn his head gently, so he can view her from the side. His neck is a little stiff, but she slumps down onto the bed beside him sitting so her back rests against his hip, petting down his neck and over his shoulders.

“I’m fine.” She seems okay, but her face has that exhaustion she tries to keep at bay etched all over it. She takes his closest hand and drops it on her stomach. “Baby’s fine. Just not as active since we left the birds.”

“We left the birds?”

“Yes.” She stands again, his hand flopping back onto the bed. “Do you feel as if you could turn over?”

“Been trying, Baby. You told me to stop.”

The smile falters on her face, her eyes narrowing, and he knows now is not the time for jokes.

Together, with her pushing as he turns, like when she healed him back in that hospital room a year ago, a decade ago, another lifetime ago, he manages to roll over.

He’s not even sure if he’s the same man he was when his plane went down in the ice, because he’s not sure, before that happened, if he would’ve been so willing to let things play out the way they did.

As he rolls onto his back, she slips a smaller pillow underneath his hips, propping them up, so he’s not laying directly on his injury. He’s red-faced from the exertion, but being able to see her face, smell her neck as she reaches behind him adjusting the mountain of pillow behind him, is worth it.

When she ducks back, he slips his hand up the side of her neck to cup her cheek, and gently kisses her, grinning as she closes her eyes. “Did they do anything to you?”

“Quite the opposite, actually.” Her hand rubs over the scruff on his chin, and when he reaches up to touch it, it feels about the growth he would after a day or two, which is a relief. “They’re still adamant that I’m carrying their answer to winning the Ori battle, so they refuse to harm me.”

“These are the same guys who put you on display in the square?”

“I don’t ask questions, Darling.” Again, she wears that placating grin, the small fake one meant to put him at ease when there’s something else he should be worrying about. She steps away from him, dragging over an armchair to sit in.

“Come lay down with me.” He smacks the mattress next to him and realizes that he’s kinda hogging the whole thing. “I can skoosh over.”

“Even though I would love nothing more than to snuggle up next to you,” she groans lowering herself into the chair, her hand supporting the underside of her stomach. “You’re still recovering from an injury, and we have other pertinent matters to discuss.”

“Like how I ended up—where exactly?”

She shifts her body, the chair squeaking beneath her as she tries to find a position that’s comfortable, finally settling on sitting angled, her back pressing into the corner. “We’re on an Ori vessel, Darling.”

He can tell by her cadence, beneath the fatigue stitched into it, that she’s not exactly pleased at that outcome.

“That’s—not the worst thing, is it?”

“Well, while we are hurdling back to our home galaxy—” she raises her legs onto the side of bed, her heels digging into the mattress, dipping the edge slightly “—we’re also on a war ship set to destroy Earth and your friends.”

“That’s—not ideal, but still we got stuff to work with.”

“Like a very pregnant wife with water retention around her ankles?” She does one finally shimmy into the corner, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Of course, that,” he chuckles, reaching for one of her feet, ringing his fingers around her ankles finding they are a little swollen. “Is that normal?”

She groans, enjoyably this time, slipping further down in the chair to allow him better access to her feet. “I’ve been reassured that it’s due to the pressure change of traveling through space.”

“Do we have a plan?”

“I don’t know—were you able to discuss one with Samantha?”

“Well—” he doesn’t really want to go into detail about being in Carter’s body for an hour, talking to Jackson who could barely wrap his mind around the situation, but as soon as he said the word ‘Orici’ all the color drained from the other man’s face.

After a couple of seconds pass and he hasn’t given her a steady answer, Vala pushes her foot to his chest, getting his attention back. “Not really. I guess once we get back to the Milky Way, just try to contact another ship.”

“I don’t even think you’ll be fully mobile by then.”

“I’ll be shuffling around.”

“We’re do to arrive in a week. You’re not going to be able to shuffle your way off this ship, Cameron. You were shot in the back and—”

“Okay. Okay.” He squeezes her foot, tickling until she keens 6her leg away from him. “Just relax. A week is a week. It’s plenty of time to figure something out.


	2. Stones of Troy

They don’t end up with much time to figure everything out because, unfortunately, the Ori ships make better time than the Priors had even thought. They approach the Supergate within five days, and a woozy feeling hits the pit of her stomach, just as it did last time.

“You okay?” Cameron stands beside her, still a little shaky and uneven with his steps. If they would have let her keep the healing device, he’d be completely fine by now without the latent pain where Tomin’s staff nearly ripped through his spine.

The Ori were nice enough to heal him up—at her behest, rather, her threat of self harm and therefore harm of their precious Orici—they saved his life, but left him with the pain and the wound which she dresses daily.

She doesn’t know what happened to Tomin, if they killed him, or if they decided he was due for a promotion since Cameron didn’t seem readily able to lead a siege.

She hasn’t seen the man since he killed Seevis without a second glace, since he tried to kill her husband because of the word of a fake religion, but if she does get the honor of seeing him again, she’ll make sure he understands the pain that he’s caused them both.

Still remembers him smiling up at Denya as she burned alive.

Remembers him trying to persuade Cameron to leave her in the village square because it was what the Priors had decreed.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

Her hand lays across her stomach, not rubbing or coaxing their child who spins within her but trying to protect. The feeling, the notion, flaring within her.

“What should we do?”

He’s hunched beside her, trying to ignore his own pain to wane her fears.

The ships line up with each other, as they lead the front of the formation. They have most of the key players aboard, the leaders, the higher viewed Priors, the Doci—a horrible man she tries to avoid at all costs—and herself, of course.

The mother of the Orici as everyone’s taken to calling her.

Making her dress in extravagant blue gowns that hug her curves, her stomach hosting their revered leader even though the little one isn’t even born yet.

“We should have stayed put.” Is her answer, offering him the smallest grin full of remorse.

It was her to try and sacrifice herself to save an entire galaxy. Knew it was the wrong choice as soon as Lorne fired upon the in the Al’kesh.

As the ship starts towards the Supergate, he reaches out, leaning into his elbows against the window ledge, holding her hand, and together they disintegrate into the blue and back to their galaxy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from Shakespeare's The History of Troilus and Cressida


	3. Themselves Destroy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from Shakespeare's Hamlet

She half expects to end up on some tertiary planet on a different warm slab of stone. Hopes this time that they’ll at least have the forward thinking to allow women essential roles other than childrearing and prostitution. Fortunately, this trip ends like any stroll through gate, perfectly reanimated in the Milky Way galaxy, however, they’re flanked by an Ori ship on either side.

The space is still, and dark, but somehow feels more familiar to her because she knows that somewhere out in the leagues of emptiness, there’s her home planet. That somewhere out there, is Earth waiting for their return. Stares at the stars while she has a chance, because she can’t help the nagging feeling that she’s going to be forced back under that mountain, with the stars once again covered up by the rocky face.

Cameron’s gentle squeeze of her elbow draws her out of her reverie, her nightmare, her probably accurate prediction. His grin is soft, easing, but the slant of his eyebrows betrays his calm exterior. “You okay?”

She nods, not wanting to dull him with how heavy the costume they force her to wear is, or how the serenity of being back in their own galaxy, closer to home than they have been in more than eight months, if offset by the plaguing intuition that everything is about to take a drastically bad turn, the notion curling up inside her, roommates with their child, permanent and heavy.

But eight months living together in virtual sin, masquerading as spouses until they eventually fell into the roles of caring for each other—neither needed much coercing—seeking the other out when they strayed too far, pining for each other despite knowing it was bad for the situation, bad for the decisions they couldn’t meet a neutral impasse at.

“Nah, something’s wrong.” He jostles her arm, again drawing her back to the ship, but also back beside him. Anchoring her as she anchors him, and the words he spoke to her when first arriving in a forest clearing have never had so much of an impact.

We both go, or neither of us do.

“I just—” she sighs because she’s unsure of how to put into words her exact hesitancy of this whole ordeal—how surreal the whole ordeal is because two days ago at this time, she very well could have been kneading bread to bake in their hearth while a week ago at this time she was chained up in the middle of the city holding on to the majority of her beliefs that Cameron would come for her, while ignoring the sliver that said she was always in this alone. “I feel—”

But a bombardment on the ship interrupts her poorly translated thoughts. She braces herself against the window ledge, using it as support. Cameron does the same thing but slips a hand behind her back to help steady her.

His eyes are wide when he stares at her, asking the unvoiced question if what he thinks just happened, actually happened.

She responds by nodding at him again, hauling herself back up beside him, and craning her head to scan out the window for any sign of Tau’ri vessel that took shots at them only to witness two more blasts aimed directly for them without enough recognition to prepare herself for the attack.

Their ship shudders from the impact, the power flickering off for a moment before just as quickly clicking back on. The ship groans as it moves, languid, turning, attempting to return fire.

“Tau’ri?”

“Yeah—they’re open firing on us.”

“I’m having an odd sense of déjà vu.”

“It’s not déjà vu, Honey, it’s a book ending.”

Another blast streaks by outside the window, illuminating the entirety of the room like the camera flashes that trailed Cameron off the stage when he finished a speech.

As Cameron helps steady her, she stares at him, knowing what they have to do, trying to make him understand without having to clarify it in defined details. When he understands her desire, he simply shakes it head.

“No.”

“It will be easier for—”

“This is exactly what happened last time.”

They always disagree about duties, about morals, about choosing the harder task which is usually the right choice, or the easier task and being complicit in many deaths—their own deaths even.

“Well, that’s why it’s bookended, Darling.”

“No, it’s not.” He scans out the window again, perhaps taking count of the ships, perhaps searching for one that’s recognizable. “We’re staying right here until—”

“Until Lorne opens fire on the ship, cracking it in half, and we die frozen and oxygen deprived in the cold vacuum of space?” He’s horrified, and it’s understandable, but he did bring this conversation into fruition. “No one is going to find us because no one is looking. If we stay here, we’re resolving ourselves to our own deaths. Is that what you want?”

“And how do you think your plan of storming a ship full of Ori soldiers with ready staffs is going to go?”

“The chaos of the battle is in our favor.” It’s true as even outside their doors they can hear the plodding foot falls of several soldiers with instructions being shouted out in tandem. Some men shout as the ship is hit again, a moderately sized piece of the propulsion unit breaking off into empty space. “I suppose it’s just a choice of if you’d like to die fighting or die cowering.”

“That’s not fair, Baby.” He presses a hard kiss to her cheek and tugs her arm, guiding her towards the door. He snatches up a vacant staff sitting in the nook behind the door. It was meant to be part of the armor doled out to him once he became more mobile. After arming himself, he glances back to her for the nod of approval before opening the door. “You know which one I’m always going to pick.”


	4. Et Tu, Brute?

He wakes up in a different bed, in a different grey shaded room.

At least this time he’s on his back and not close to suffocating in a pillow. He can’t really feel the pain in his back, and again, he wiggles his toes they respond, but slowly—slower than he’d like. There’s a beeping to the left of him, and once his eyes focus on the equipment, he can tell he’s back on Earth.

There’s a window to the left of him which offers a clear view to the other side of the medical building standing strong in the starts of a snowstorm. For a second, just the briefest of seconds, he thinks that the whole thing was a dream, that he had a painkiller induced dream for the last two years during which his mind created his dream woman, who also happened to be an ex-host to a malicious alien.

He groans, shuffling his legs, and twisting his back, where he can feel the pressure now. Jackson sits to the left of him in the exact same chair he sat in last time. When the doctor notices him, he flaps away the newspaper he’s holding, folding it up in his lap and adjusting his glasses up on his nose.

“You’re awake.”

“Do I even want to know what happened this time?” He pushes himself up into sitting, and the pain boils in his back down to the top of his one leg. “Where’s Vala?”

Jackson sighs, shoving a hand underneath his glasses and rubbing at his eyes. “We managed to get to you before the Ori ships were completely obliterated. We ringed you up to the Odyssey per the President’s orders, and back down to Earth.”

“Where’s Vala? What happened with the Ori ships? We were able to get them out of the galaxy?”

“You need to take it easy.” Jackson stands, dropping a hand to his shoulder to settle him back to the bed. “You got shot in the back when we were ringing you out. You had to go into emergency surgery immediately.”

“No.” His brows fall as he thinks. He was shot in Seevis’s pub. Vala was taking care of him on the ship—he was almost better before— “Where’s Vala?”

“Mitchell, you have to—”

As Jackson tries to turn away, he grabs his sleeve, using what strength he has to wrench him back in place. “Where is she?”

Calmly, Jackson starts to unhook his fingers from his sleeve, once free, he ducks back, returning to the visitors chair. There’s a half empty coffee cup on the side table, and one of the lights is angled away from the bed to shed enough light to read.

Jacksons steeples his hands, inhaling deeply—the doctor is smart, from what he knows, he’s compassionate, has always been caring with Vala. The fact that he’s taking extra time to compose himself, to calculate his words, isn’t reassuring at all.

“Mitchell, what I have to say, you don’t want to hear.”

“Tell me.”

“President Landry put a suspension on talking about what happened with the Ori invasion until we have all the facts.”

“I was there, Jackson. I was—” He slams his fist against the railing, sending reverberations throughout the cot, and a pain spreading through his knuckles.

“Look.” Jackson holds out his hand, stopping one of the nurses from coming into the room and adjusting whatever they’re drugging him with to make him fall back asleep. “The best thing you can do right now is just get better. Let all of this settle for a bit, and once we know exactly what we’re dealing with—”

“She’s pregnant.”

Jackson sighs heavily again, waving the nurse in, who has a needle full of something to inject right into one of the tubes leading into his arm.

As a last-ditch effect, he tries to collect whichever one she’s going to need.

“That’s my kid.”

“Mitchell, just let them help you first, you—”

“She’s my wife!”

“Uh huh.” Jackson nods, collecting his paper, standing to the side as another nurse enters the room, taking the needle and injecting it instead into the iv bag. “Unfortunately for you, the government of the United States doesn’t feel the same way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Title Borrowed from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Story title taken from Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost.  
> Chapter title taken from Twelfth Night


End file.
